The Apple Polishing Cloth has been updated to support the iPhone 17, iPhone Air, 17 Pro models, the new Ultra 3, SE 3, and Apple Watch Series 11.

Oh, thank god! Wouldn't want to polish with an incompatible cloth.

You Need To Be Bored

This time, a video.

🧠 Boredom is good for your brain: When you're bored, your brain's “default mode network” is activated, which helps you think about your life and what's important to you.

📱 Smartphones are killing boredom: We use our phones to fill every spare moment, which prevents our brains from entering this default mode. This usually leads to anxiety and depression.

💡 Embrace boredom: By allowing yourself to be bored, you can come up with more creative ideas and be more engaged in your daily life.

❗And another related post: The Simple Weekend Habit That Makes You Less Unhappy

Strategy & Urgency

⏳ Urgency has two faces: The article introduces two types of urgency. Proactive urgency is strategic action taken now to create future advantages. In contrast, reactive (or regrettable) urgency is being forced to act due to past decisions or external pressures, which often indicates your strategic options are already limited.

📉 Prioritization frameworks are missing something: The author points out that popular frameworks like RICE, MoSCoW, and even Cost of Delay don't explicitly account for how the value of something changes depending on when you do it. They focus on “what” is valuable, not “when” it is most valuable.

🧠 Urgency is a key part of strategy: We think of “urgency” as being anti-strategic (like a last-minute sales request). The author argues the opposite: understanding and controlling timing, tempo, and windows of opportunity is a fundamental part of a good strategy.

❓ Ask better questions: Instead of getting stuck debating value or estimates, teams should make their prioritization conversations more strategic by asking questions about time. For example, “What is our window of opportunity?”, “Where can we safely wait?”, and “How can our timing create an advantage over competitors?”

Breaking a role to multiple titles

• 🤯 The term “role” is overloaded — The author argues that using the word “role” is confusing because it mashes together four distinct concepts: your official Title, your seniority Level, your area of Focus, and your technical Specialty. This ambiguity makes conversations about careers and responsibilities unnecessarily difficult.
• 🧩 A four-part framework for clarity — To fix this, the article proposes breaking down a person's position into four clear components:
  • Title: The formal, HR-approved job name, like Engineer or Product Manager.
  • Level: The seniority or career progression step, such as I, II, Senior, or Principal.
  • Focus: The primary domain or team you work in, like Platform, Product, or Backend.
  • Specialty: A specific, often flexible, skill or expertise, like React, Go, or Accessibility.
• ✨ Separating growth from job function — This model decouples career progression (Level) from day-to-day work (Focus and Specialty). It creates flexibility, allowing someone to change their Focus (e.g., moving from a product team to a platform team) or learn a new Specialty without it needing to be a formal promotion or title change.
• 🛠️ A practical tool for managers — By using this framework, leaders can get a much clearer picture of their team's composition. It helps identify specific gaps — for instance, realizing you need more Senior-Level people with a Frontend Focus and a Design Systems Specialty — leading to more precise hiring and better team planning.

The Art of the Disagree

🗣️ Disagreement is a search for truth — The author argues that productive disagreement isn't about conflict or winning an argument. Instead, it’s a necessary tool for stress-testing ideas and collectively finding the best path forward. A culture where people don't speak up is dangerous, as silence can be mistaken for consensus.

🧠 Understand before you disagree — To disagree effectively, you must first genuinely understand the proposal you're challenging. The author advises you to be able to argue for the opposing side even better than its proponents can. This ensures you're addressing the strongest version of their idea, not a misunderstanding.

❓ Define the problem first — Many disagreements happen because people are unknowingly trying to solve different problems. A key step is to pause the debate about solutions and ask, “What problem are we actually trying to solve?” Aligning on the problem often makes the best solution much clearer.

🤝 Commit, even if you lose — The process ends with “disagree and commit”. Once a decision is made, everyone must get behind it completely, even those who argued against it. There is no room for saying “I told you so” later. The goal is to make the chosen path succeed, and that requires unified effort.

Expectation mismatches with your manager

🤫 Friction comes from unspoken rules — The primary source of conflict or misunderstanding with a manager isn't usually a major disagreement, but rather a mismatch in implicit, unstated expectations. Both parties assume the other operates the same way they do, leading to frustration when they inevitably don’t.

📋 Three common areas of misalignment — The author highlights that these expectation mismatches typically happen in three key areas:

• What you work on: The level of autonomy you have versus how much direction your manager expects to provide.
• How you communicate: The expected frequency, channel, and level of detail for updates on your work.
• How you are measured: The difference between “output” (completing tasks) and “outcome” (delivering business impact).

🙋‍♀️ It’s your job to seek clarity — Don’t wait for your manager to tell you their expectations or for a negative performance review to reveal a problem. The article stresses that it is the employee’s responsibility to be proactive and initiate conversations to uncover and align on these unstated assumptions.

🔑 One question to unlock everything — To kickstart this conversation, the author provides a powerful, non-confrontational question to ask your manager: “What’s one thing I could do differently to work better with you?” This simple question opens the door to honest feedback and helps build a stronger working relationship.

That’s all for this week’s edition

I hope you liked it, and you’ve learned something — if you did, don’t forget to give a thumbs-up, add your thoughts as comments, and share this issue with your friends and network.

See you all next week 👋

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